Reclaiming the Loch Ness Monster from the current tide of debunking and scepticism. If you believe there is something strange in Loch Ness, read on.

Tuesday, 27 June 2017

New Photo from Loch Ness

A picture, purportedly of the Loch Ness Monster was published today in some main newspaper websites. Taken at about 1720 on the 22nd June by Australian, Peter Jackson, about four miles south of Urquhart Castle, it is certainly a curious photograph.

The account is reproduced below from the Daily Mail and is also covered by The Sun. The object was estimated at being 150 yards away and was described as moving fast northwards. The articles states that photographs in the plural were taken, but it looks like only one is visible online. Access to the sequence would obviously confirm the movement and possibly even velocity of the object.

A look at the picture suggests the classic long neck looking back towards two humps. But the zoom in below makes you think more of a swimmer with arm upraised. Again, access to the picture sequence would confirm or deny that. For now, I assume the object maintained roughly the same configuration throughout. The most noticeable item is the appendage which has a very evident "kink" in it which suggests it is an un-Nessie like feature.

Indeed, the object is so lacking in uniformity, that one would begin to think it is a large piece of tree debris (though I cannot recall if tree debris goes out that far). Again, if one could see the complete sequence, some theories may come to the fore more than others.

UPDATE

I hve now found a second photograph at this link and shown below. The position of the foreground foliage confirms it is another picture, presumably taken a little earlier and it is clear that this is no swimmer as the "arm" is still stuck up in the air. Zooming in on picture (further below) does not fill me with confidence either that it is a sail boat. I say that because I see no peson sitting up in either picture.

Note there is what might be a lighter area, perhaps a reflection off the surface of the object which may be obscuring part of the objet and giving the impression it is less than it is. Let's just say I am liking this picture more, the only sceptical interpretation that can be entertained is a weird piece of tree debris. Considering it was making its way towards Urquhart Castle, it should be no problem to find this, photograph it and post it on the usual forums. Then again, maybe not.

Holidaymakers on the trip of lifetime have
taken a mysterious photograph of a fast-moving large object - leading
to claims that it could be the Loch Ness Monster.

Peter
Jackson and Phillippa Wearne, of Sydney, Australia, were driving
alongside Loch Ness in the Highlands when they saw something big gliding
through the water.

Retired engineer Mr
Jackson, 64, and former lawyer Ms Weare, 60, said they were stunned by
what was only the second claimed sighting of the monster this year.

Ms Wearne said: 'I really was just stunned
and I thought, "what is it?" It was pretty big even from 150 yards or
more offshore. I didn't know what to think.

'We
took photos and showed them to people at a B&B and (then) on a
cruise. Skipper for the Loch Ness Project, Ali Matheson, said he had not
seen anything like it.

'It seemed to be moving fast but in the
direction of the current. We just figured if he's worked on here for
years and not seen anything like it, then it must be something.'

Mr
Jackson added: 'We were dumbfounded but excited. We just thought 'wow,
what is it?' It has been a childhood dream to come here.

'We were just driving along when we spotted it. We stopped the car and ran back along the road to get the shots.'

The
couple noticed the object moving at 5.18pm on June 22 about four miles
south of Urquhart Castle, while driving north on the A82 on the west
side of Loch Ness.

They safely stopped, ran back to find a clearing in the trees and took out their smartphones to take pictures.

Mr Jackson said: 'I know I saw something and I know it was large so I am keeping an open mind.'

And Ms Wearne added: 'We had a lovely feeling between ourselves watching it until it disappeared.'

Gary
Campbell, registrar of sightings at Loch Ness, said: 'It's great that
once again smartphone technology has allowed visitors to the area to
snap something unusual at the loch.

'This makes it much easier to identify known creatures which has led to a drop in recorded sightings over the past few years.

'This
is only the second sighting of 2017 to make it on to the official
register and we're already halfway through the year, so we're delighted
that Nessie appears to have popped up again.

'With regard to Peter's pictures, as with pretty much all Nessie photos, they are just that little bit indistinct.

'However,
the report that he has submitted gives much more detail on the
distances and time frames and from this, there is really no clear
explanation as to what the family caught on camera.'

He is appealing for anyone else who may have been in the area and seen anything similar on June 22 to get in touch.

The couple arrived in the UK on June 1 and will continue on their travels until returning home to Sydney on June 30.

Ms Wearne said: 'It has always been a wish of ours to explore Scotland - we have Campbell and Cameron blood apparently.'

41 comments:

That object is quite a distance out, far from shore for a swimmer unless they are wearing a wetsuit, that is cold water! I know because I swam in the Loch years ago.The eyewitnesses mention twice it was a fast moving object however there is no visible wake or surface water disturbance ( none I can see )Perhaps that is one large hump with water cascading over its center thus creating an apparently odd shape? or is it plainly visible as a divide in the middle?hmmm....interesting, maybe something out of the ordinary but needs further analysis.

I agree. Whilst you do see swimmers in the bays and at Dores and Fort augustus it would be unusual to see one in this area so far out. It could be a log or a branch, or again it could be one of the Nessie's.

Could easily have been swimmers. There are people training in Urquhart Bay at the moment for the Loch Gu Loch race which crosses the bay. They train and race in pairs tied together and carry their running kit in inflatable flotation sacks.

I did a little experiment with my pretty decent camera phone, and reckon that unless the object is within about 200m (depending on size), and the sun is in the right place, you wont get anything conclusive. The fact that this creature turns up time and time again as 'dark' in peoples descriptions makes the sun's position doubly important. Another aspect that people may not be aware of is that the reflectivity of water causes a camera to underexpose the photo. Although this may not be huge, it is not helpful on this occasion. In the hands of someone experienced, a manual setting, or a semi-automatic setting with more exposure value added would do the trick here (though camera phones may not have these functions).

Could be swimmers could be debris could be creatures! But at least it's something new to talk bout rather than toy submarines from the 30's or old bales of hay from donkeys years ago lol I wonder if there was high winds at the time of this photo cus it cud be debris! Anyone know??

I'm not sure it's a swimmer at that distance. Unless they're pretty big. Would be interesting to know if the object showed any signs of being animate, something that the couple didn't mention, or wasn't reported.

Something is spotted in the Loch, a picture is taken with a mobile phone, the image is then viewed by the person(s) who took the picture and is not deemed worthy of public exposure due to the lack of detail, clarity, definition etc. caused by the limitations of such a device. If the image above was taken by a capable person with a high end photographic device with quality zoom then obviously there would be a far greater chance of identifying the object in the image. Alas, such professional equipment is not as prevalent as mobile phones around the Loch. They are there but in far, far less numbers than phones that create much poorer images which are more readily disregarded.

I love the reasoning there Pete, but...if someone saw something worth trying to take a photo of, wouldn't they still report the sighting even if the photo didn't show anything? Unless Nessie swims right up to you and poses, the chances of getting any image worthwhile with your telephone are very low...

I would make the effort if I had a sighting, and even a poor picture, to report an incident but I am interested in the mystery. I'm not so sure that many other people are but they might be if Owd Nessie was to smack them in the face so to speak and not be like most recorded sightings are which involve some considerable distance if I'm not mistaken. The image in this article is a typical example in my opinion.

Well because if it was a creature that only briefly surfaced as they were looking at the loch then it would only be them that got a snap. If it was debris floating about then more people would see it. cant see how you see that as a straw man argument.

When I'm there I often don't bother to take pictures of what's obviously a swimmer or a log, and if I did I wouldn't publish them. I wish these people had published all the pictures they got. If it was a swimmer the arm action ought to be obvious when pictures are compared.

The second picture makes things a bit more interesting, but if it is an animal swimming you would think that what appears to be the head and neck would have changed postition. The usual description in the few high speed neck/head sighting I can recall has the neck sticking straight out the front...

After comparing the pictures side by side it is not clear to me that the object is moving.The second photo could have been taken from a different angle giving the impression of movement.If the object has moved and maintained it's shape I think that would indicate that it is inanimate.

Comparing which feature on the far shore are lined up with the object, the line of sight appears to have moved through about a quarter of the horizontal field of view of the first picture. Assuming that my figure of 60 degrees for the field of view is correct, and that the distance is 150 yards, either the camera or the object would have to move about 40 yards between pictures. The account gives no hint that the camera moved that far, so it would seem that the object must have moved. How fast? We don't know because we don't have the times.

Wouldn't be nice to see unedited files, so the EXIF data would show the camera details and the times the photos were taken? I promise I'll supply that data when I get the picture of the century.

What is really interesting on phones and contemporary cameras, is that a GPS co-ordinate should be part of the exif, unless this is switched off. It would add a huge amount of weight to folks accounts. The pictures are interesting, but don't seem to show any animation of the 'animal'. But then again, it doesn't look like anything that one would expect to see there. The shots are also too indistinct to be able to rule out a Photoshop forgery. That's camera phones for you.

Possibly, and more reasonable than the dogmatic pronouncements of "swimmer" and "boat" from certain "leading" sceptics. Leading us down the garden path more like it. Just shows you that even the "experts" can be brushed aside.

Marcus Atkinson drives one of the Ribs that take tours out of Fort augustus all day everyday, he has more experience of actually spotting objects on loch ness than most of us put together. Several times that day he says he passed a team in a transatlantic rowing boat travelling from the fort to inverness. He says they had a makeshift spinnaker up to help them along. He says that is what is in these photos. I saw the rowing boat the next day when it passed Dores, it did not have the spinnaker up when I saw it, it was much like a cruise ships lifeboat, big rounded ends with a cut away section in the middle where the rowers sat. If I remember rightly the ends were white with sponsors names in black. If saying that the object in these pictures is a "nessie" is what it takes to avoid having the powers that be categorise me as a "sceptic" then I have a problem, because I believe, Unfortunately, Marcus is right, he past it several times that day, he knows the water better than most, and he is actually at loch Ness. As to the term "experts" surely nobody can be an expert on something that remains unidentified. ... And for the record, I am not a sceptic. To me the only mystery left regarding this photo is why a transatlantic rowing boat was heading away from the Atlantic?

Indeed and if what Steve says is true, it looks as though a camera phone isn't capable of giving us a clear picture of a larger type of rowing boat at a reasonable distance. Suggestions of it being a swimmer, tree trunk or some other form of debris appear to be way off the mark. Thanks Steve for solving this case for us.